Category: citation analysis

Microsoft Academic is on the verge of becoming a bibliometric superpower

Last year, the new Microsoft Academic service was launched. Sven E. Hug and Martin P. Brändle look at how it compares with more established competitors such as Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. While there are reservations about the availability of instructions for novice users, Microsoft Academic has impressive semantic search functionality, broad coverage, structured and rich metadata, and […]

Female scientists are considerably more likely to be mistakenly cited as if they were males than vice versa

Gender stereotypes appear so enduring that certain prestigious professions continue to be almost exclusively associated with the male gender. Michał Krawczyk sought to discover if scientist was one such profession by studying the citations to a large sample of academic publications and identifying cases of gender misattribution of the cited author. Although the overall prevalence of gender misattributions is quite […]

Google Scholar is a serious alternative to Web of Science

Many bibliometricians and university administrators remain wary of Google Scholar citation data, preferring “the gold standard” of Web of Science instead. Anne-Wil Harzing, who developed the Publish or Perish software that uses Google Scholar data, here sets out to challenge some of the misconceptions about this data source and explain why it offers a serious alternative to Web of Science. […]